by Rick Wood
“What?” Cia prompted.
“I just thought you would wear something prettier. Something more radiant, that would bring out your beauty.”
Cia didn’t know what to say. Why did that matter? Why would this guy care whether she looked pretty or not?
“I don’t think a Maskete or a Thoral or Lisker, or even a Waster, for that matter, is going to care whether or not I look pretty,” she said. “But I am going to need to run. Especially if I am to find Boy.”
He stayed silent for a moment. In contemplation. She would love to know what he was thinking.
“I see,” he said, then turned to Lucy. “Take her to see the Bearers. That’s where she can stay.”
Lucy nodded, and Troy left.
The Bearers?
What the hell was that?
“Follow me please,” Lucy said, and went bouncing out the room.
Cia followed, walking down a spiralling stone staircase until they came out into the open room of a church. Across the pews were men laying down, sleeping, some were eating, some playing cards, some even arm wrestling. Sleeping bags were scattered across the benches and solid floor, and Cia wondered why they slept in such poor conditions.
Lucy led Cia through this room and, as she walked through, Cia found every head lifting and looking at her. Every card game paused, every arm wrestle stopped, even those asleep sat up to see. Their expressions all stayed blank, but behind their eyes there was something that made Cia feel uncomfortable, feel dirty, much like she did with the Wasters.
They arrived at a large door that led to a large hall. Lucy opened the door and stepped aside for Cia to enter, shutting the door behind her.
This was where the women were.
Across the room were beds, vastly more comfortable than the hard surfaces the men were made to sleep on. A mass of women lay on these beds, or read, or pottered around, going about their business.
The woman closest to Cia turned and smiled at her. Cia noticed that she was pregnant. Heavily pregnant, like she would burst at any minute. The smile was warm, genuine, a comforting greeting that should make Cia relax, but she felt that something was wrong.
She walked forward, between the beds, looked to her left, to her right. They smiled at her. Some of their smiles were lovely, some of them forced, but all of them at least attempted to appear happy.
She noticed another pregnant woman laid on a bed.
Another one stood, and she was pregnant.
And another.
And another.
Cia abruptly felt the need to leave.
Every woman here was pregnant.
22
Cia charged through the church. Lucy ran up to her and grabbed her hand but she shoved her off, refusing to be deterred.
As she marched between the pews, all the men sat up and watched her, like lecherous meerkats, each of them voyeurs to her escape.
She made it to the doors, ready to kick them open and leave this place, whatever the hell it was, until two guardsmen moved in her way.
“Move,” she demanded. She didn’t care that they were carrying guns. She wasn’t prepared to stick around to find out what they might force her to do.
They remained unaltered. Expressions dead. Bodies immobile
“I said move.”
Nothing.
“Where are you going?” came Troy’s voice, and she turned to find him casually meandering toward her. Behind him, every man was looking, so many of them, eyes on her, everyone peering to see what she was going to do.
Why were they all staring at her?
Why were they so desperate for her to stay?
What do they want to do to me?
“I’m leaving.”
“Why?”
She huffed. She was fed up with this.
“I’m going to find Boy.”
“I told you, I have men searching for–”
“I don’t care! I do not care that you are looking for him, if you actually are. I want to leave.”
Troy smiled. One of few smiles he seemed to show, and it was a cocky one, one that showed that he was in charge.
“Why would you want to leave? Look around. You have everything you ever wanted. A bath. Clean clothes. Companionship.”
“Companionship?”
“Out there is cold. Out there you are constantly hunted. Out there, you don’t stand a chance.”
She looked around again. She felt far more hunted in here than she ever did out there.
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Why?”
“I’ve survived this long.”
“Just.”
“Why are you so adamant about me staying? What is it you want from me?”
She regretted the questions as soon as she asked them. She turned back to the two beefy men stood in front of the door, holding their guns across their chests and barged into them, put her hands out trying to break them apart, but it was useless. It was like a mouse trying to push a brick. She stood no chance.
She turned back to Troy. Her confident demeanour was disintegrating. Now she felt scared. Now she felt alone.
“Let me leave. Please.”
Troy shook his head. “I cannot do that.”
“Why? Please, just tell me why.”
“Because you are important, Cia. Far more important than you realise. You have an amazing chance here, a great chance to do something historic, to do something that will help this world begin again.”
“What? Get pregnant?”
Troy raised his eyebrows, as if her guess was close, but she still needed a little pushing.
“What you can do is far more than that.”
She shook her head.
“We are repopulating the Earth,” Troy explained, his voice reaching out to her, suddenly so passionate. “We are replenishing the diminishing human population. And when we are done, we will have an army, and we can fight again, we can reclaim this Earth.”
“I’m seventeen. Did you know that? I am seventeen years old.”
He shrugged. “You’re old enough to bear a child.”
Cia glanced at Lucy, who was stood across the room, amongst the men still staring at her.
“And if I say no?”
Troy looked over his shoulder at the others, then turned back.
“I am willing to grant you a choice of who you will bear with. I haven’t given this to any other Bearer, but I will do it for you. If you wish–”
“I get to choose?” She threw her arms into the air. “Wonderful! Absolutely wonderful! You are a charmer, you know that? You drive a hard bargain.”
“Look at what you get in return, Cia.”
“I’d rather be eaten.”
She turned back to the two guardsmen and beseeched them with her eyes.
“Please. Please let me go.”
“If you do not cooperate–”
“No! I will not cooperate! There are monsters out there, but there are worse monsters in here. At least those out there are doing it for survival.”
“This is for survival.”
She shook her head.
“Please. Please, I beg you. Just let me go. Let me find Boy, let me go back to the life I was living. I want nothing from you.”
Troy stepped forward. Cia took a step back, only to find herself walking into one of the guardsmen. She felt his horrible body against hers and she flinched away from him.
“You have the option of a comfortable bed, or a prison cell. The choice is yours.”
She shook her head. She felt tears now. She couldn’t control them, they were just there, one of them trickling down her cheek.
“That isn’t a choice,” she said, but it was barely a whisper, and it was barely enough.
Troy nodded at the guardsmen and they took her away.
23
The cell was a far worse alternative to the bed, but Cia did not regret it. She had no intention of cooperating. As far as she was concerned, these people were worse than the Wasters.
Strange, how monsters can rise up from Hell and the world can descend into chaos – yet it’s still humans who end up being the biggest arseholes.
The floor of the cell was mossy and bumpy. She couldn’t sit anywhere without being discomforted by the scratch of green life or the uneven surface of the stones or cracks between broken pieces of floor. The wall she leant against was just as bad, prodding the back of her head with uneven bumps.
She closed her eyes. Tried to ignore the uneasiness of the surface and focus on Boy. On how she was going to get out of there. On how she was going to save him.
If she was going to save him.
For starters, she had no idea where he could be.
She had no idea whether he was still alive.
And she had no optimism that she would ever be able to leave this place and escape back into the world of the monsters.
Now, she just had to wait.
For what?
For someone to come along and…
She couldn’t let herself think it. She couldn’t let her mind complete the sentence. This was abhorrent. Humiliating. Degrading. And there was no way she–
“Hi,” whispered a voice.
She opened her eyes. Looked around.
“Over here,” the voice said.
Across from the bars of her cell was another cell, where a person sat in the shadows. The person crawled forward into a small layer of light, revealing another girl, possibly about Cia’s age, but in far worse condition. Her clothes were useless rags that didn’t cover anything precious, but instead boasted the wounds and bruises that covered her skin. Her ribs prominently announced themselves against her stretched skin, and her legs were so thin they barely curved. Her hair looked like it used to be blond, but now it was so engrained with dirt it was empty of colour.
“Hi,” Cia said.
“What’s your name?” the girl asked.
“Cia. What’s yours?”
“Harriet.”
Cia wanted to help this woman, but she felt too despondent to engage. She wanted to lift her head back and sleep. This girl, however, looked like she needed help – even if the only help Cia could give was the comfort of brief conversation.
“Are you new?” Harriet asked.
“Yes. Aren’t you?”
“No, I’ve been here a long time.”
“Did you refuse as well?”
“No. Well, at first. But that’s not why I’m down here.”
Cia grew intrigued. She crawled forward from her corner.
“Why are you here?”
Harriet shrugged. “Not good enough, I guess.”
“Not good enough for what?”
Harriet looked to Cia with a wounded expression of burdened knowledge. “Do you not know why you are here?”
“Yes. I do. I think so. But I’m not giving in to them without a fight.”
“There’s no point in fighting.”
“There has to be.”
“They get you every day, and they try every day until you…”
Cia started to understand why Harriet was in the cell opposite hers.
“How many times?”
Harriet turned to the wall where she had scratched a mass of lines. She looked over them and quickly counted, ten at a time.
“Four hundred and sixty-five.”
Cia’s head dropped. She wanted to cry for this girl. She desperately wanted to do something to help her, to make her see that this wasn’t okay.
“Are you telling me they’ve tried that many times?”
“Yes. And I know it’s me, because they tried different… And I still…”
Cia’s hands wrapped around the bars. She shook them, feeling for weaknesses. They rattled slightly, but remained firmly in place.
“Cia…” Harriet said, quietly, as if she was about to confess her deepest, darkest secret.
“What?”
Harriet’s head lifted, her pained eyes gazing at Cia’s, and Cia truly saw in that moment what these people had done to her.
“I don’t think I want to try anymore.”
“You don’t?”
“No. I don’t think I do.”
“And have you told them that?”
She nodded, then paused, then shook her head.
“I tried to. I tried, but–”
The battering of a door against a wall and the creak of its hinges announced itself. Harriet immediately scuttled back into the shadows of her cell. Cia sat back a little but remained strong, defiant in the face of what was to come.
But they weren’t coming for her.
A man, grubby and large, unlocked Harriet’s cell.
“No, please, I don’t want to–”
The man grabbed hold of Harriet’s hair in a large clump and ignored her screaming as he dragged her away. Cia listened as Harriet’s sporadic footsteps marked the stone floor with her struggle, until finally the door slammed behind her.
Cia sat alone in her silence. Listening intently. Even the sound of the rain belting against the stone wall was muted. For a moment, she wondered if she was still breathing, as she couldn’t hear it.
But she was breathing. She felt it.
At least she had that. Her breath. Her life.
Harriet returned much later on, shoved back into the corner of her cell. She promptly crawled into the corner, facing away from Cia, curling up into a ball as small as she could manage.
Cia watched the burly guardsmen leave and noticed that they didn’t take the keys with them. They left them on a hook on the wall at the far end of the corridor. For a moment this gave her hope. The keys were unguarded, left there for her to…
No. She was kidding herself.
She was locked in a cell with sturdy bars and no way out.
The sudden hope left as she realised she was stuck here.
She turned to Harriet, who was still curled up, facing the wall. Cia knew she was crying. She could hear it. Harriet’s body was convulsing with tears.
“Hey,” Cia said. “Hey, you okay?”
She didn’t reply.
“Harriet, are you–”
Then Cia saw it. On Harriet’s exposed back. A large, red slash, like a whip mark. And, lower down, a pool of blood trickling across her inner thigh.
Cia closed her eyes and willed herself to sleep. She couldn’t bare to stay conscious any longer.
THEN
24
Cia had no idea what was happening; but she did know, in no uncertain terms, that she was in danger. She had never seen her dad have such a short temper. Every question she asked was either ignored, rebuffed, or urged to keep for later.
She was being led by his hand through a crowd of people so tightly pressed together that she couldn’t see anything but bodies. She couldn’t even see her dad, she could only see the end of his arm trailing behind him; and that was because both of her hands were clinging to it. She wanted to be sick, and she wanted to be able to stretch her arms out – but most of all, she wanted to be able to see her dad’s face, or at least the back of his head. No one cared about bumping into her or suffocating her; to everyone else, her survival was irrelevant. She was a child, but that afforded her no sympathy; it was about instinct. To these people it was her or them, and they chose them.
She could hear an engine. Over the shouts and chatter and nervous words exchanged, she heard it. Chugging, but with a consistent pitch that suggested whatever the engine belonged to was stationary.
The closer she became, the louder the shouts were. She could see a cloud of black smoke trickling into the air from the nearby vehicle, rising above all the torsos and faces surrounding her.
The closer she was to the engine sound, the more of the shouts she could make out.
“So you’re just going to leave us here to die!”
“What gives you the right to live!”
“We are humans too!”
She wondered what these people could be feeling so angry about, and what could be making them say suc
h things. Wasn’t there a transport here? Weren’t they getting on it?
The wading back and forth of the crowd grew stronger. Her cousin had once told her about a heavy metal concert he went to and how he was in something called a mosh pit, and this was exactly how that sounded.
They reached a fence and she finally saw her dad, who looked up at a man stood on the platform. She didn’t get a good look, but he was wearing some kind of uniform, and her dad was shouting something to him. Everyone was shouting. She was shouting. The fence was pressing into her belly, her chest, her neck, everyone behind her was pushing so hard.
“My name is Daniel Rose, I – what is it?” He diverted his attention from the man to her. He noticed that she was pressed up against the fence, so he lifted her up and stood her on it, holding her and keeping her steady.
She could see behind her now. The mass of people shouting angry things, everyone’s face red and cross. On the platform behind the fence was a train, and along the platform were people – she recognised the uniform now; they were from the army. They had guns. Some of them stood still with guns across their chest, but most of them were aiming the guns into the crowd, a lot of them shouting stuff like, “Get back!” “Don’t even think about it!” “I will shoot!”
But that didn’t seem to stop the people shouting back at them.
“You elitist pig!”
“How are you gonna sleep tonight!”
“You rich ignorant pricks!”
Cia had never heard a lot of these words and she wondered what they meant.
She turned back to her dad, who had managed to grab something from his pocket, some sort of identification, and he was pushing it toward the soldier stood above him.
“See, identification, my name is Daniel Rose! I’m a scientist for the government, I’ve been asked!”
The soldier paused for a moment, looking judgementally at them both, then turned to a list he had. He scanned it, then turned back to Cia and her dad.
“You’re on it. She isn’t.”
“She’s my daughter!” he said in a voice that Cia had only heard when she was in trouble.